Streaming genocides: Gaza, El Fasher, and the spectator’s sin

I keep thinking about how, at this time, nothing can truly be hidden. Drones, satellites, and mobile phones record destruction as it unfolds; the devastation in Gaza and the siege of El Fasher reach us in real time. And yet, paradoxically, the more we see, the less the world seems capable of responding. Didier Fassin once wrote in Humanitarian Reason that modern compassion often turns into spectacle, and through that, we display empathy, but we rarely translate it into justice. I realise now how accurate that feels… Pity circulates instantly, but accountability stalls.  Instead of halting violence, governments have learned to manage it by narrative. They invert responsibility, portraying those under bombardment as aggressors and those exercising dominance as victims. In doing so, they erase the pre-history of occupation and siege, converting structural oppression into momentary “conflict.” Tacitus described this centuries ago – it is human nature to despise those we have injured. And that logic persists right now; states justify harm by dehumanising those they have already harmed.

I cannot stop returning to Gaza. As of 5 November 2025, more than 68 000 Palestinians have been killed and over 170 000 injured. The International Court of Justice has already ruled that Israel’s actions plausibly violated the Genocide Convention. Furthermore, the UN Human Rights Council’s 2025 report describes starvation, blocked aid, and attacks on hospitals, and Brown University’s Costs of War project concludes that Israeli operations “create conditions of life incompatible with survival”. The numbers, the names, the ruins, and even the silence that follows a proclaimed ‘ceasefire’ all speak of a Gaza systematically dismantled. Then, my mind shifts to El Fasher in North Darfur, where famine now deepens. Satellite evidence from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab confirms mass graves and organised body disposal, reports from Le Monde Afrique describe more than 2000 civilians killed in a single week and the UN-backed IPC has formally declared famine  -Phase 5- in El Fasher and Kadugli. Each of these findings points to deliberate starvation – a war crime under Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute. When the RSF targets non-Arab communities like the Masalit “in whole or in part,” it falls within Article 6’s definition of genocide. Yet, because the UN Security Council remains paralysed by vetoes, the ICC has not received a referral. Nevertheless, none of this appears accidental, and we all have witnessed and keep witnessing the normalisation of an unprecedented destruction which was administered through logistics and legitimised through law.

But I remind myself – and we all know this by now – Genocide is never only about killing. Under Article I of the Genocide Convention, states have an affirmative duty to prevent and punish genocide.  Moreover, the ICJ clarified in Bosnia v. Serbia that this obligation begins the moment risk is known – and in Gaza, it was not merely known- it was witnessed, recorded, and broadcast by all of us in real time. So, when governments continue transferring arms or political cover to a state plausibly committing genocide, they cross into complicity, as defined by Article III(e) of the same Convention.

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And so, I see that law itself is unequal, the “inequality of lives”  the way humanitarian reason reproduces hierarchies instead of dismantling them. Once again, enforcement follows power instead of principle. There, accountability arrives quickly when perpetrators are weak and slowly, if at all, when they are allies of the powerful. In this sense, both Gaza and El Fasher expose the same structure, where justice is rationed according to political convenience.

I often hear people say they feel grief or outrage. But emotion without structure achieves little. Humanitarian feeling, detached from legal or political obligation, becomes “a politics of the heart without a politics of justice.” The ICJ ruling on Gaza and the UN’s warnings on Sudan have clarified what states must do. What remains missing is the will to do it. 

If accountability truly mattered, it would begin with halting arms and surveillance transfers to governments plausibly engaged in genocide or starvation crimes. It would extend to enforcing universal jurisdiction for aiding and abetting, supporting independent investigations, and ensuring reparations that restore agency rather than dependence (Genocide Convention Arts. I & III(e); Rome Statute Arts. 6, 8(2)(b)(xxv), 25(3)(c)). Most importantly, it would apply the same standards everywhere.

So, I find myself returning to a simple conclusion: seeing must lead to acting. Humanitarian discourse often makes inequality bearable by framing injustice as a tragedy. To resist that moral dilution, witnessing must become accountability, knowledge must lead to prevention, and prevention must culminate in justice. Silence can no longer claim innocence. To witness and abstain from action is to validate violence by omission. 

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